Originally published on March 22, 2012, here
Does anyone still think The Apprentice is an intellectual business game show, a week-by-week seminar on how to succeed? Unless the contestants are actors, the answer, bafflingly, must be yes.
The Apprentice opens with trumpets, people in suits walking with hard-set expressions, and tall buildings with shiny windows. It looks clever. It looks businessy. In reality the business tips are about as useful as watching the Teletubbies flop about in biscuit mixture. In fact, I have unwittingly described an episode in the last season, in which contestants had to invent and make a new biscuit – because obviously real business people are also skilled bakers.
The prize used to be a job in Lord Sugar’s company. Now it’s an investment of £250,000. As impressive as that number sounds, it’s a much cheaper prize than a job. It seems even Lord Sugar is feeling the sting of the recession.
The show starts with the classic formula: meeting the contestants, who sell themselves with poorly written, well rehearsed lines. “I am a meaningless adjective, a pointless noun and an absolutely rubbish metaphor.” Katie said, “I call myself the blonde assassin, because I let people underestimate me just so I can blow them out of the water.” An assassin is a murderer, not someone who is underestimated. But at least she made a point about her hair colour. It smacks of relevance.
8AM. The board room. Lord Sugar announces they are not playing a game of Where’s Wally, but doesn’t elaborate. He divides the teams by gender as usual. Perhaps next season, for variety’s sake, they could divide them by race, religion or sexuality?
Team names are decided. The boys come up with Phoenix, so they can rise from the ashes. Which suggests the feeling in the team is “This is going to be horrible, but hopefully we’ll win anyway.” It bodes ill, but at least it proves he’s watched the show. The other team name, Sterling, came to Jenna in a dream. She looks surprised when this doesn’t warm the cockles of Lord Sugar’s heart. Next season’s team name – Naked at Work Again.
Phoenix print “THIS IS A” over a picture of a bus on t-shirts and bags and decide to “sell it to a gullible tourist”. The girls flog t-shirts with scrawled pictures of monsters, and put such immense pressure to buy on a poor shopkeeper they get told off by a passer-by.
The girls lose, and the boardroom suddenly resembles an episode of EastEnders. There is shouting, sniping and eye-rolling. Bilyana begs to stay in the process, at length. Lord Sugar decides he really, really wants her to stop talking. Asking her to doesn’t work, so eventually he goes to plan B, “You’re fired.” Plan C was probably some kind of bag-over-the-head situation, also ending in being bundled into a vehicle and driven from the premises.
Despite there being no job offer (at a time people need it most), Sugar still goes with “You’re fired”. If you pitched a business idea and the investor decided he wasn’t interested, you’d be genuinely baffled if he pointed at you with his ET finger and announced that you were fired.
The saddest thing about the new series of The Apprentice is the lack of laughs. I miss lines like “Three for a pound, there’s only two left!” I miss hilarious boardroom explanations, like “When I was producing, that was production.” I miss Melissa’s mind-blowingly poor use of language, “I am a mixed bag of nuts and this task speaks to this bag.” I miss Brent-ish Stuart Baggs and his “field of ponies”.
Is there potential? Absolutely. Gabrielle told the cameras “I will literally roar my way to the top.” Literally. I am very excited for the board meetings to come if that’s true. On a serious note, the incorrect use of this basic word is quite infuriating. Every time it happens I literally get annoyed, and figuratively vomit.
So maybe it’s not tired. Perhaps it’s just groggy. Either way, I’m watching.
They had me at Where’s Wally.
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